


Sore Winner

by Elfpen



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Oneshot, Other, Short, mentions of Pietro's death, sibling stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 11:56:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4136580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfpen/pseuds/Elfpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a lifelong race that she would have preferred to lose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sore Winner

46.4 centimeters. They had been exactly the same length when they were born, and the doctor’s pen on their birth certificates was the starting gun to a lifelong race.

By the age of two, he was bigger than her, but somehow, they were still the same height. He stood up first, and when they watched the home videos later in life he would insist that this made him the taller one.

By the age of seven, she was learning to walk in her mother’s high heels, and surreptitiously raised her pencil mark on the doorframe by a wobbly six centimeters. Her brother tattled on her and called their father to moderate a rematch. She’d somehow shrunk, or so she’d tell them. Maybe her brother had stolen her height so that he could brag those three extra centimeters on her.

By the age of ten, they did not know who was taller. Neither could stretch out to their full length in their concrete rubble cage to tell. There was no more doorframe or parents to arbitrate the case. 

By the age of twelve, she was half a hand taller than him. He was as bitter as lemons about it. Everyone had always told them that he would be taller - what no one had bothered to mention is that she would begin growing first. While she waited for her brother to catch the puberty virus, she learned to spy for coppers over his head through brown curls and prop her elbows up on his shoulders when they grew tired from reaching up for rich ladies’ generosity. He made her climb the dime store shelves to find the best (and cheapest) pastries for their two-member birthday parties.

By the age of seventeen, he was the tall one. Tall enough to reach the jaw of her two-faced lover with his fist and put her face into his shoulder while she cried.

By the age of twenty, she knew he was even taller, but it was hard to tell when he ran around so quickly. She read his mind and heard him call her ‘little’. The next time they were let out of their cells, she snuck a look at the doctors’ files and saw that she was ten centimeters shorter than him; she lied and told him it was five.

By the age of twenty-three, however, she was the tallest once and for all. 

Wanda Maximoff let her hand fall onto the cool granite headstone (it was 95 centimeters tall, she’d measured) in the middle of his memorial garden. How could either of them have guessed that he’d end up buried in New York, in such a beautiful park?

But then, how could they have known that she would win their game by six earthy feet at the age of twenty-three?

“You are still taller, Pietro. You always have to be,” She told him quietly one dewy morning. There was a seven-foot spire at the garden’s entrance that she’d always imagined was him, standing guard. She looked over her shoulder at it, spying where she’d graffitied their doorframe marks with permanent marker - his ten centimeters above hers. “I am a terribly sore winner, you know.”


End file.
